Evening of Awkwardness

Latitude 53 invites members and guests for an evening of performances on Wednesday September 27th at 7:00 pm. The Evening of Awkwardness will be MC’d by Dr. Carrie Smith-Prei, an associate professor in the department of Modern Language and Cultural Studies, and will feature performances from Julianne Chapple, Billy-Ray Belcourt, and Stacy Cann. Admission is by donation.

Carrie Smith-Prei

Dr. Carrie Smith-Prei is Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta where she specializes digital feminisms, feminist media and cultural studies, transnational performance art activism, and affective publics. She most recently published the coauthored monograph Awkward Politics: Technologies of Popfeminist Activism (with Maria Stehle, McGill-Queens UP, 2016) and the coedited volume Digital Feminisms (Routledge, 2016). She has received awards for research and teaching.

Carrie Smith-Prei’s research looks at how the digital fundamentally restructures cultures of feminism; it asks after the future of feminism and feminist activism in the digital sphere and the meaning (and limits) of global feminist solidarity, community-building, and transnational collaboration. In the book Awkward Politics (McGill-Queens UP, 2016) she and her collaborator, Maria Stehle, develop awkwardness as a means of engaging with the complicated meanings and unstable positions of the political in contemporary feminist work. Through discussion of social media platforms, hashtags, performance art, film, and literature, we develop awkwardness into a theoretical tool for intervention that has a broad range of applicability, from social movements to the academy. The current project, “Digital Feminisms as Feminist Futures,” builds on the awkwardness project to ask more broadly how digital feminisms are engaged in building more racially, sexually, and socially just futures through tracing their 1) creative materializations (from video art to street protests) and 2) world-making practices (coding, hacking, feminist labour, tool-building, collaboration). Digital feminisms offer strategies for political work also in the non-digital world and in analog spaces by opening up different ways of developing connections, communities, and discourses.

Stacey Cann

Stacey Cann is a visual artist from Edmonton, Alberta whose work uses absurdity to explore aspects of the everyday. She has shown her work at the Ministry of Casual Living, Harcourt House Artist Run Centre, Latitude 53 Contemporary Art, and the Drawing Room among others. Stacey has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Print Media from Alberta College of Art and Design as well as a Masters of Arts in Art Education from Concordia University.

Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt is from the Driftpile Cree Nation. He is a PhD student in the Dept. of English & Film Studies at the University of Alberta. His debut collection of poems, This Wound is a World, is out now with Frontenac House.